“They are not all asleep,” replied the chief of the Devourers; “it is absolutely certain that some one in the house has neither eaten nor drunk.... Look! see that light!”
“We have a plan of the house; from where does it come?”
“I need no plan to know,” replied Ferragus; “it comes from the room of the Marquise.”
“Ah,” cried De Marsay, “no doubt she arrived from London to-day. The woman has robbed me even of my revenge! But if she has anticipated me, my good Gratien, we will give her up to the law.”
“Listen, listen!... The thing is settled,” said Ferragus to Henri.
The two friends listened intently, and heard some feeble cries which might have aroused pity in the breast of a tiger.
“Your marquise did not think the sound would escape by the chimney,” said the chief of the Devourers, with the laugh of a critic, enchanted to detect a fault in a work of merit.
“We alone, we know how to provide for every contingency,” said Henri. “Wait for me. I want to see what is going on upstairs—I want to know how their domestic quarrels are managed. By God! I believe she is roasting her at a slow fire.”
De Marsay lightly scaled the stairs, with which he was familiar, and recognized the passage leading to the boudoir. When he opened the door he experienced the involuntary shudder which the sight of bloodshed gives to the most determined of men. The spectacle which was offered to his view was, moreover, in more than one respect astonishing to him. The Marquise was a woman; she had calculated her vengeance with that perfection of perfidy which distinguishes the weaker animals. She had dissimulated her anger in order to assure herself of the crime before she punished it.
“Too late, my beloved!” said Paquita, in her death agony, casting her pale eyes upon De Marsay.